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Guest blog – Julie Creffield

Most teenage girls collect Lipsticks CDs or even boys numbers, but not me – No I collected quotes…yep you read that right QUOTES. Now remember we are taking about the early ninety’s long before the rise of Facebook or Instagram.

I don’t really know how it started as I didn’t exactly grow up in a household full of motivational speakers, unless you count “if you don’t get up those stairs” as self help but to escape the humdrum of life I would lock myself away in my room away from my siblings and flip through my various diaries and notebooks that were filled with scribbles or cutting of things I had read or heard that struck a cord with me.

Sometimes these were from famous people and sometimes just important people in my life like my Nan, who’s advice to me was “Don’t settle for the first guy you meet, try out a whole heap until you find one you like”

I guess at aged 13 or 14 it is hard to see that life will ever be any different from the life you see around you. Living in the East End in amongst a very working class community and a family of builders and caregivers words of wisdom were far and few between and often too difficult to put into a context of my own.

As an adult I still have moments where I feel overwhelmed with the stresses and strains of life and take comfort in the motivational quotes I can easily bring to mind to help cope with a difficult situation. “Better to be looked over than overlooked” from Mae West has been the motto to my life, and “better to reach for the stars…” well we all know that one don’t we.

I have always been a creative person of sorts, but blogging has taken this to a whole new level. When I started my blog in 2010 I never imagined anyone other than my friends and family would read it, but in some ways it took me back to those days where I filled notebooks with my thoughts, and the thoughts of others with the hope that one day someone would find them and be enlightened in some way. Even at aged 13 I had a weird sense of importance I guess.

Blogging takes this to a whole new level though because if you have something important to say to the world, technology enables you to broadcast it and sometimes the world kind of stands up and starts to listen and the more they listen the more you realise that the messages you share really can have the ability to help someone who is having a bad day.

So when Mark asked me to contribute some words of wisdom ie some QUOTES to his App I was secretly over the moon, little did he know that I had waited my whole life for the opportunity to be the creator of quotes rather than the collector of them.

I don’t know when that point came in my life where people actually started to take notice of what I had to say, but it is an almighty privilege and a little scary some times. My work on The Fat Girls Guide to Running blog might be about motivating overweight and inactive women to take up running, but in fact many of the little sayings I find myself repeating over and over apply to other areas of people’s lives.

You don’t need to be Fat or Unfit to find lessons about facing your fears, or caring less about what strangers think about you – in this world we are often so wrapped up in what we are doing we give little care or attention to what others are up to, so all those little voices in our head need to be silenced, especially if we want to achieve those Big Fat Stupid Goals I bang on about all the time.

I wish Mark and his team all the very best with their InspirationAL app, and I hope if nothing else the quotes I submitted make you stop for a moment and think. You never know, they might even end up in someone else’s scrapbook in years to come.